HARNESSING THE CLOUD TO ACCELERATE NEW PROGRAMS IN AEROSPACE AND DEFENSE

Aerospace and defense manufacturers and their suppliers are facing record backlogs as commercial airlines look to retrofit older equipment with more fuel-efficient engines, introduce new revenue-generating services and purchase long-haul aircraft.

The growing demand for new aircraft is putting pressure on IT departments to rapidly roll out applications and supporting infrastructure that will support new development, faster production, more integrated logistics, and collaboration with an increasing number of suppliers. A&D companies will be better placed to meet this demand by moving applications and processes to the cloud. In doing so, they will be able to:

• Accelerate application development and release

• Rapidly upgrade applications to access the latest functionality

• Benefit from little to no downtime when upgrading or swapping out applications

• Standardize business processes for employees and suppliers worldwide

• Free up IT resources and budget, and reduce costs

And yet, manufacturers, including those in the aerospace industry, have been slow to adopt and optimize these time- and money-saving technologies.

MOVE FASTER WITH MODERN APPLICATIONS Launching a new product may require the implementation of an entire ecosystem of applications, including product lifecycle management software, supply chain and logistics applications, manufacturing execution systems, and an emerging class of mobile apps for connected products and machine-to-machine systems for smart operations. But rapidly rolling out and deploying new applications is difficult due to the silos that often exist between development, testing and IT operations. Using a cloud platform to develop and test new applications removes bottlenecks, automates and manages software releases, and improves efficiency.

Many companies are also hampered by outdated applications and infrastructure that are structured around product and organizational lines. The strain of maintaining those systems leaves too few resources free to focus on innovative programs. Often organizations don’t realize that the effort to upgrade, refactor and cloud-enable core applications is self-funding when done in phases, in that it releases budget that can be redirected to the next set of activities.

A&D companies are beginning to tap into the cloud to speed the rollout of applications and infrastructure that support new products and programs and at the same time lower IT costs.

As an innovator in next-generation information technol-ogy, CSC can help you formulate a clear vision and strategy to adopt a new IT operat-ing model leveraging the cloud. We can also help you adopt DevOps processes to accelerate your app-lication release cycle and aid in building the business case for application moderniza-tion, transformation and migration to the cloud.

HARNESSING THE CLOUD TO ACCELERATE NEW PROGRAMS IN AEROSPACE AND DEFENSE

IMPROVE COLLABORATION ACROSS THE ENTERPRISE AND ECOSYSTEM As more manufacturing companies rely on a wide range of trusted partners to help design and manufacture specific components for a given product or product line, cloud technology can serve an important role in facilitating the coordination of R&D, engineering designs and data between these suppliers. Collaborators around the globe can have access to data from multiple sources, eliminating information silos and automation islands that stifle efficiency, collaboration and innovation.

Sharing real-time, consistent information with supplier partners and workers enables concurrent engineering and rapid experimentation and simulation that would otherwise not be possible. And because of its ability to coordinate information across vendors, platforms and devices 24 hours a day, cloud technology can reduce costs through precise accounting of time, equipment usage and inventory.

MORE EFFICIENT USE OF INFORMATIONThe ability to rapidly provision platforms in the cloud can significantly increase the speed of compute-intensive activities such as R&D, testing and simulations. Engineering services are also made more efficient through real-time data sharing using a consistent format across the globe.

Storing the huge amounts of data generated by aerospace products and manufacturing equipment is more effective in the cloud. And, utilizing pay-per-usage infrastructure that the cloud provides can support new analytics in predictive maintenance, anomaly detection and supply chain efficiencies.

KEY STEPS TO MOVING TO THE CLOUDTo move to a cloud-empowered enterprise, we recommend that you consider these important points:

• Assess your entire application portfolio to formulate a clear vision and strategy to shape, transform and manage applications and move them to a cloud-based, as-a-service model.

• Know your workloads and security requirements for managing applications in a hybrid environment of public and private clouds. Make sure you have a policy-based platform to manage governance, security, automation and application portability across different clouds and cloud suppliers.

• Look for opportunities to move application development to the cloud. Make sure your program includes processes for provisioning of platforms, embedding standard operating environments upstream, automating application and service configuration, and managing development activities.

• Take aggressive steps to secure your systems and intellectual property against advanced persistent threats and sophisticated state-sponsored adversaries. Make sure you have a comprehensive set of tools and processes for the Detect-Analyze-Adapt-Respond lifecycle, based on your organization’s unique risk profile.

CSC can help you identify next-generation technology that complements your long-term goals and develop a strategy that leverages the latest in cloud, big data, Internet of Things (IoT), ERP and security technologies. We can help you migrate to a new cloud-enabled IT operating model that accelerates operations and supports business innovation. We have the depth of products, industry know-how and strategic partnerships that can bring your operations to a higher level through the use of next-generation information technologies.

Learn more about cloud empowerment for the A&D enterprise at csc.com/cloudAD.

SUCCESS STORIES

Selex ES, an inter-national aerospace, defense and security systems company, combined three separate operations into a single organization. This required the consolidation of four SAP systems to a single system operating in a private cloud environment. Benefits included faster consolidation and integration of three independent businesses, improved cloud-enabled disaster recovery and 2x to 9x reduction for SAP operational tasks.

Aerospace giant BAE Systems has reduced its time to provision a project environment from 8 – 12 weeks to just 3 days by using cloud technology.

Overall, migrating to the cloud typically reduces application management costs by 20 to 30 percent.

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